Western Digital has the Most Reliable High Capacity HDDs with a Failure Rate of Under 0.35%

Interesting. That has not been our experience at work.

Add the WDDA analytics where even if nothing is wrong with the drives, after three years, WDDA starts to complain about drive health (in the Synology NASes - I know this because we use NASes for Content Storage in all our locations), along with the various issues (some of which cannot be fixed) with their SanDisk line, or their quietly replacing CMR for SMR in their NAS/surveillance drives, and one can only wonder.

I confess that I do not know about the WDDA in QNAP NASes, because I am not using WD drives in my TS-873A, but I do know that its firmware does support both the IronWolf Health Management and WDDA, both of which are not technically a part of the firmware of the NASes themselves, but contributed by the drive companies, so I expect something similar on that end.

To be fair, I very much like the WD Gold 18Tb drives, and use them in our work RAIDs quite a lot.

I'm certainly not certain about their new large capacity drives, but WD has not gained back the trust they lost with some of their shady doings for me.

Then why, out of 5 that I purchased, have 2 failed and 1 more is failing. Different shops, different times within the last 3 years :(

I believe it. Last year was the first time since I started building systems in '94 that I bought a non-WD HD (a seagate 10tb "Enterprise".) That POS dies in less than a year. I've never had a WD go bad on me.

They also have the scummiest tactics.

Did they recall those broken by design external SSDs, or are they still trying to sell them and to blame it on the Sandisk brand?

Why not just link BlackBlaze's quarterly report instead... https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-2023/

Too bad they cost as much as a small house.

Still, I will keep an eye on and follow both companies

What's the difference between the WD/HGST 22TB Ultrastar HC570 and WD 22TB Gold Enterprise Class? On specs, they seem identical other than the branding, and are even sold at the same price point.

Really? I feel like people are talking about WD failures all the time on here

The Seagate’s seem dead reliable as long as you don’t get the cheapest option

Anecdotally I've had nothing but bad luck with Seagate and not one dead drive with WD yet

Nonsense content shill post

Not sure that the failure rate is all that important anymore because in the first instance most people are running SSD's as their primary drive and secondly who stores bulk data on solitary hard drives?

With easy to use filesystems like ZFS, I store data using Raid-Z (raid 5) or Raid-Z2 (raid 6) which is a bit more expensive, but it means a single hard disk failure is no longer a case of catastrophic data loss.

If you're going to be running a Raid-Z/Z2 stripe in your NAS and you're given a choice of buying hard drives with a 2% AFR or alternatively a different bunch of drives that have a 1% AFR but cost say 10%-20% more then which do you choose? Since you no longer have data loss with a single drive failure so then it's just an economic decision of which is the greater cost of either dealing with extra RMA's vs paying more upfront.

According to that data, 8TB Seagate drives (ST80000NM000A) are as reliable, if you don't need the density.

I’m heavily invested in seagate exos. Back in the 90s seagate was the pariah manufacturer. It varies by product line. Maybe I’ll switch it up again maybe I won’t. None of these guys stay in business by making shit drives.

Nice, they also leaked a ton of customer data 👏

I do not think, that this rate will make much sense for users since it will be visible with the huge amount of drives. So, I will still look for the best deals on the drives rather than brand.

HGST SAS here. Installed in 2016 and still running well